Archive for May, 2006

I’d be more impressed with the recent announcements by Yahoo (lawsuit nonwithstanding in this particular instance) and MSN concerning their new Web advertising initiatives if I received more traffic from them. Really, how much traffic does Yahoo and MSN see as opposed to Google? Advertising on proprietary content sites is ok, but then you’re beholden to traffic patterns on those content sites.
Think simply, traffic = $ and more traffic = more $$$. You would think part of the reason for Google AdSense’s success is that the Google Network (Google specific and affiliates) commands so much traffic.

Oh boy am I going to be grumpy in about 6 hours from now. Note: if messing with backgrounds or what seems to be simple vertical borders in WordPress, check the header.php template first to delete the background images.

Yeah, my first thought would have been to check header.php for a page background.

At work, because I’m doing more concept and presentation rather than straight on Web dev, my markup and CSS are optimized for churning out ideas of “can we do it?” rather than cross-browser rendering. Also, I write markup and CSS by hand, and the simple editor I use doesn’t correct for small idiocyncrasies.

So I was caught surprised when I found out my lazy way to express background color in a td tag wasn’t working properly in Firefox. Worked fine in IE6 though.

lazy way: bgcolor=”cc0099″

cross browser rendering: bgcolor=”#cc0099″

The problem? I neglected to add a #sign to the hex color. This method namely wasn’t working in table cells. In my markup I wasn’t seeing issues with font-color and it didn’t matter if it was HTML bgcolor or CSS background.

Update 05/06/06: Tickets? oh hahahahaha. I was on ticketmaster.com at 10 am this morning. I reloaded and watched when the radiohead tickets went from being not on sale yet to being sold to being sold out in less than 10 minutes online.

What ticks me off is that there were tickets on ebay and stubhub.com *PRIOR* to the 10am sale today. How did these morons get tickets to scalp at ridiculous prices? I was seeing tickets anywhere from $200 to a pair of pit tickets at $1700. No, I didn’t misplace the decimal there.

Separately, XM said the Federal Communications Commission determined the company’s SkyFi2 radio transmitter doesn’t comply with FCC emission rules, meaning the signal it transmits to a dashboard car radio is often too strong….

Many consumers without satellite radio have reported picking up its signals, presumably from nearby cars using FM modulators to transmit the signals to their radios. “XM’s immediate problem is that unless they are confident that the accusation against them is wrong, they really have to pull the model off the market until the problem is resolved,” says Mr. Tannenwald. “

Their favorite stations aren’t broadcasting Stern’s show, which has moved to satellite radio provider Sirius. Instead, poorly installed or defective satellite radio units, which act as mini-FM transmitters, are being blamed…Some of the units use FM signals to broadcast the satellite signal to the car’s audio system, using frequencies low on the FM band such as 88.1, often reserved for noncommercial, religious or educational stations. The signal from the satellite system can sometimes override broadcasts from those stations for listeners in nearby cars.

If (or should I say when) the FCC decides that both XM and Sirius have overpowered FM modulator units, I wonder how these units would ever be recalled. For the record, I’ve only heard the Howard Stern show (i.e. Sirius) overpowering my radio receiver station. Since switching my XM SkyFI receiver station to 107.1 I haven’t had any issues with hearing other people’s satellite radio.